What Is an Intellectual?

“What is it, then, that intellectuals should do? In order to answer this question, it is first necessary to return to a claim made earlier, namely that the telling of truth cannot be the responsibility of an intellectual because being an intellectual, in its very definition, is truth-telling.”

There are a number of ways in which we may approach the subject of the intellectual. One way in which we may do so is by tracing the history of the notion of an intellectual and showing how it is used today. Eric Hobsbawm’s essay, “The Intellectuals,” concisely surveys this notion by highlighting the shifting centers of authority and transition from traditional voices (Priest, King, Yogi) to modern forms thereof (Scientist, Intellectual) via the prominence of the written word and wide communicability of late modernity. Hobsbawm also points out what he sees as a decline from the heydays of public intellectuals. To illustrate this, he examines the French school of the 20th century, with intellectuals such as Foucault, Sartre, and Camus firmly occupying the public sphere, contrasting this to the relative decline of public intellectuals in the present day. Hobsbawm’s insight is instructive because he only mentions one example of a living public intellectual at the time of his writing: Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky also writes about the role of the intellectual, by providing a point of departure towards an alternative approach of how we may think of intellectuals. Rather than, as Hobsbawm does, providing a history of the notion of a public intellectual, Chomsky, a scientist by training and profession, makes explicit what he takes to be the role and responsibility of the intellectual to be in his brilliant and famous 1967 article “On the Responsibility of the Intellectual.” Therein, writing about the social and political context of American military activity in Vietnam, Chomsky outlines the role of the intellectual in simple terms, he states: “IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.” He then follows this statement by stating: “This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment.”

What is revealing about this assessment is that Chomsky then goes on to provide examples of thinkers who do not conform to this idea; he targets Heidegger in the same paragraph. Subsequently, he provides ample evidence of intellectuals who pander to power (deliberately speaking untruth, and actively lying). Chomsky’s strategy, it seems, is to assert what the role of the intellectual is in terms of political and social responsibility—and then expose and discredit bogus intellectualism relative to this standard.